Farmers next in line for China’s bounty: ANZ’s Smith

ANZ chief Mike Smith in Chengdu this week . . . “Going from a bowl of rice to two bowls of rice a day isn’t going to make a difference. The difference is the growth of the middle class.”
Photo: Qilai Shen

Chengdu ANZ Banking Group chief executive
Mike Smith
says China is about to do for Australian farmers what it did for the country’s miners a decade ago.

While everyone is talking about the end of the minerals boom – something he disagrees with – Mr Smith said in­sufficient attention had been paid to the potential surge in Chinese demand for soft commodities, such as grain and meat.

“People just don’t get the soft resources story at all," Mr Smith said on the sidelines of the Fortune Global Forum in Chengdu, a city in China’s southwest where ANZ has set up an operations centre and plans to open its next retail branch.

“Demand for protein is just growing exponentially in this part of the world, and as this middle class develops, the amount of income which is available for choice in terms of what people wear, where they live and what they eat is going to have a signiﬁcant impact on that demand." He said: “Countries like Australia and New Zealand are just at an extraordinary advantage because the logistics costs are so much less than anywhere else."

The comments followed the release this week of the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s closely watched outlook report, which predicted production constraints and rising demand would result in big jumps in China’s imports of beef, dairy and coarse grains, used for animal feed.

The report, produced with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, said that by 2022, China would become the world’s biggest per capita consumer of pig meat, imports of coarse grains would double and dairy imports would rise 20 per cent. At the same time, China is expected to remain self-sufﬁcient in its main food crops of rice and wheat.

Demand from China’s growing middle class would support prices and ensure that more deals were done in the agribusiness sector, which is one of the target areas for ANZ, Mr Smith said.

“A lot of people talk about the move out of poverty as leading to the big shift in food demand but that’s not right. Going from a bowl of rice to two bowls of rice a day isn’t going to make a difference. The difference is the growth of the middle class. That’s the big change."

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Mr Smith, who is on his fourth trip to China this year, met Prime Minister
Li Keqiang
earlier in the week as part of a delegation of leading executives from the Fortune Global Forum, including former US Treasury Secretary
Henry Paulson
. He said Mr Li was very comfortable with an economic growth rate of 7 per cent “in the medium term", below the government’s ofﬁcial forecast for this year of 7.5 per cent.

“The Chinese government has made it very clear the economy would change over the next 30 years from an export-driven economy to a consumer-based economy," Mr Smith said.

That means there is unlikely to be any more big spending stimulus packages. However, Mr Smith, who has spent many years in the region heading HSBC’s Asian business before joining ANZ, said as more and more Chinese people moved to the cities, spending on infrastructure and housing would continue to underpin demand for Australian resources, like iron ore.

“I don’t think the resources boom is over," he said. “Prices are still higher than they were ﬁve years ago and there’s nothing to say they’re going to be dramatically different in the next few years."

Echoing comments from Australia’s former Treasury Secretary
Ken Henry
during a speech in Shanghai this past week, Mr Smith said the government needed to introduce economic reforms while the going was good.

“There’s 20 to 30 years to run in this and that’s the opportunity Australia has because in this time, it has to transform the economy," he said.

“It’s already had 10 years without realising it and it’s really got to grasp the mettle and say ‘We’re going to make the best use of this time’."

Mr Smith said the latest investment phase of the resources boom had ended, but the extra production was now coming on line, which would continue to fuel economic activity.

He also said it was important for Australia to follow New Zealand’s lead and sign a free trade agreement with China to make the most of the growing demand for agricultural goods. New Zealand’s agreement is “quite narrow" but “has been very effective in creating the impetus for trade and investment".